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2009-10-02

NVIDIA's Next Generation Chip Architecture 'Fermi'

Nvidia pushes further into mainstream computing

The company, which made its name selling specialty computer graphics chips designed for gaming, on Wednesday demonstrated a new chip architecture code-named "Fermi," which Nvidia's Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said will roll out in the next few months across the company's GeForce, Quadro and Tesla graphics processors.

The Next Generation CUDA Architecture, Code Named FermiThe Soul of a Supercomputer in the Body of a GPU

The next generation CUDA architecture, code named “Fermi”, is the most advanced GPU computing architecture ever built. With over three billion transistors and featuring up to 512 CUDA cores, Fermi delivers supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of traditional CPU-only servers.

NVIDIA Paralle DataCache - the world's first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand

NVIDIA GigaThread Engine with support for concurrent kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX fluid and rigid body solvers)